Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder - Hardcover

Cressy, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019969575X ISBN 13: 9780199695751

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Synopsis

This is the story of saltpeter, the vital but mysterious substance craved by governments from the Tudors to the Victorians as an 'inestimable treasure.'

National security depended on control of this organic material - that had both mystical and mineral properties. Derived from soil enriched with dung and urine, it provided the heart or 'mother' of gunpowder, without which no musket or cannon could be fired. Its acquisition involved alchemical knowledge, exotic technology, intrusions into people's lives, and eventual dominance of the world's oceans.

The quest for saltpeter caused widespread 'vexation' in Tudor and Stuart England, as crown agents dug in homes and barns and even churches. Governments hungry for it purchased supplies from overseas merchants, transferred skills from foreign experts, and extended patronage to ingenious schemers, while the hated 'saltpetermen' intruded on private ground.

Eventually, huge saltpeter imports from India relieved this social pressure, and by the eighteenth century positioned Britain as a global imperial power; the governments of revolutionary America and ancien regime France, on the other hand, were forced to find alternative sources of this treasured substance. In the end, it was only with the development of chemical explosives in the late Victorian period that dependency on saltpeter finally declined.

Saltpeter, the Mother of Gunpowder tells this fascinating story for the first time. Lively and entertaining in its own right, it is also a tale with far-reaching implications. As David Cressy's engaging narrative makes clear, the story of saltpeter is vital not only in explaining the inter-connected military, scientific, and political 'revolutions' of the seventeenth century; it also played a key role in the formation of the centralized British nation state - and that state's subsequent dominance of the waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

About this title

About the Author

David Cressy is George III Professor of British History and Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University. A social and cultural historian of early modern England, concerned with the intersections of elite and popular culture, central and local government, and official and unofficial religion, he has also written on literacy, kinship, calendar customs, book-burning, and the man in the moon.

A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, David Cressy is a frequent visitor to England, where he has held visiting fellowships at Churchill College, Cambridge, and at Magdalen, St. Catherine's and All Souls Colleges, Oxford.

Review

Review from Dangerous Talk: "Readers will come away well informed about just how colourful the language of the English people, at their boldest and most deliberately subversive, has been over the centuries."

--Anthony Fletcher, Times Literary Supplement 04/02/11

"A splendid catalogue of outspokenness ... this engaging book opens a window into the social history of pre-modern politics."

--John Spurr, BBC History March 2010

"[Cressy's] meticulous research into unruly tongues touches upon village scandal, bawdy gossip and rumours, with colourful cases ranging from cursing in a Cheshire village to a row between Cambridge academics."

--Jenny Uglow, Financial Times 18/01/10

"Scholarly in nature and light in tone, Dangerous Talk is an intriguing glimpse into the private thoughts and public punishment of neighbors in pre-modern England."

--Lauren Puzier, Marie Antoinette's Gossip Guide to the 18th Century

"An important and convincing story, and David Cressy makes many useful reflections along the way upon the nature of early modern popular culture. In all respects this is another solid achievement from a reliably good historian."

--Ronald Hutton, History

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 019969575X
• ISBN 13: 9780199695751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256